Ooooops, it's Saturday

Well, I posted a slide show of the rug I painted on Wednesday and said I would give details Thursday....well my life has been on a never ending treadmill the since February, business changes all the way around and working models and generally spreading myself very thin...

this is all manageable , but I do have a time problem...no matter how well i plan my week, something always either takes longer or is unexpected...so I seem to be playing catch up these days...so in the scheme of things..this posting being only three days late is a minor blip....

the rug...where does someone begin....I have painted things from graphs before ...customers have often thought that stitching from a graph is easy, until they start..it is always easy to correct a painted canvas...but much harder to rip out stitches when you lose your place...Small graphs are easy to paint from...but a large rug

this one being 36 "Sq. on 10st...is harder than you think...even the most exact painter, as i like to think of myself...finds it hard to not drop stitches and lose count over such a large project...like knitting...

anyway...it started the rug by counting out the top and right side to start my painting...

the customer changed some colors and i deleted some greens, that frankly I thought weren't necessary and would make it easier for the customer to work...sometimes designers get carried away with shading, over the years I have found that keeping to a dark , medium and light of one family is plenty and that no matter how clearly you paint , a stitcher will get too confused if you go overboard with too many shades... to make it easier..i mixed my colors and coded them the same as the graph...this helped...and after the first quarter of the rug had been painted, I knew each and every color code....

things moved slowly...and some days it seemed I didn't make any progress...

the tricky part was making it all fit together at the end......after losing a stitch here and there,

i just did a little creative fixing at the end ...you would never notice.......

this rug was a free-bee in a magazine called Stitcher's World.....offered over many issues...a bit at a time...the rug was designed by Sharon S. pope and it was called Victorian garden...free is the tricky part here...you get what you pay for in life...and if you have a year or two to count and work this rug from a graph..then go for it...clearly you have time and the patience of a Saint...

my customer only wanted the center bit...it had a boarder of flowers in the original...way over the top...too busy by far and i think the center was plenty....

the customer tried to count the rug herself , but found it so hard to follow and frankly being able to sit and work a painted version is much kinder to your mind...

I did this rug because , the customer is a lovely lady and I have painted her dogs and restored an old stool her mother had worked that had become damaged by time, sun and the elements...she is a joy..... this type of painting is not my thing.....the only advantage I had , was that i stitch paint everything....

I knew it would be time consuming and frankly I thought I would never finish...It is much easier to draw and paint your own image ..but painting following a graph this size is for the birds and I will not repeat this type of project again....maybe I am just getting old.....

the comical side was that 10st requires a lot of paint and that each and every day my hands and lower arms looked like a Jackson Pollock painting...

but the customer was trilled and thinks i am wonderful...so making her happy helps and with everyday that passes, I recover from this long project...

so all is back to normal...while i was painting , I was in a bear of a mood...it made me irritated...some projects just do...and it is not always the big projects...it is just life....you never know...but after more than 37 years of painting everything under the sun in needlepoint...you can always tell, what will be a boooger to paint after the first day.......trust me ...this was a boooger .......lol...